


The Blessing of Presence

by Princess of Geeks (Princess)



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Character of Color, Episode Related, Episode: s10e20 Unending, F/M, First Time, Missing Scene, Romance, season 10
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-16
Updated: 2010-03-16
Packaged: 2017-10-08 01:02:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/71096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Princess/pseuds/Princess%20of%20Geeks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Trapped on the ship during "Unending", Sam learns to lean on Teal'c.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Blessing of Presence

Sam was all right, really, until the general died.

She had coped. She'd found things to enjoy -- music, science, Vala. Then Vala had taken up with Daniel and Sam was sad for a while. She missed her best girlfriend.

She played with experiments of all kinds, tidied up quite a bit of research she'd always thought about getting around to. She made herself limit her work on their always-receding-immediate problem to one day a week. Otherwise, as Daniel kept telling her, she'd drive herself crazy. As usual, he was right.

He spent a lot less time with her, too, after he took up with Vala.

She didn't begrudge them that, really. It was nice. Someone should find some joy here.

Landry and Cameron found their own ways of coping, which involved vast amounts of solitude.

But Sam learned to enjoy hours of home-made music, hours of star gazing, and the occasional game- or party-nights that Vala insisted on organizing.

Teal'c, she concluded, was the least changed, the least distressed of them all. Perhaps his greater age, so invisible to her despite a decade of working and fighting beside him, made him more philosophical. Perhaps it was a Jaffa thing. Perhaps he would have been this stoic after years in Hawaii. No way to tell.

But she was okay. Really. Until Landry died.

And then it was as if she felt, finally, the entire weight of absence of all the people she'd loved, lost to her in death or in this living death on this dreadful ship. All those people, from her mom, on through to her Dad, Janet, Pete, Cassie, and Mark, and the girls, and Jack -- on down the line. All those people, all those ruined dreams, all that waste....

Why it had to be her, there at the end, why it had to be Sam Carter who was willing to wait out the quiet hours, sit the death watch, she had no clue. But she did it for the general. A tribute, perhaps, to everything he had been, and failed to be, for them. A tribute to the institution she'd sworn to serve, regardless of the individuals inhabiting each uniform. The service was bigger than any person, even though she'd had to stop herself all her life from confusing the person with the service, the man with the uniform.

Losing Landry meant, as nothing else could, that their existence on this ship really was the end -- a quite literal dead end, an endless string of futile gestures, made inside a tin can. All of it, wasted. All of them, useless. The scientist and the soldier had made their peace inside her when she could be part of SG-1 -- the timeless being of the researcher balanced perfectly, yang and yin, with the action of the soldier, the freedom of flight. But now Landry was gone. The Air Force, personified, was gone. And her mind, her life of the mind, that always was her refuge and her garden, was nothing more than a sealed can of sterile air, frozen in space.

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear, does it make a sound?

Sam decided that it didn't.

She sat in her quarters and played the cello she'd fabricated, played in random long notes, mourning in her own way, pouring out her heart through the music she'd cobbled together out of alien technology and forgotten dreams.

And what she kept coming back to, over and over, like a worry stone, like an endlessly repeating chorus, was the moment when she left Landry's quarters and ran smack into Teal'c standing his own vigil, there outside in the hall.

How long he'd stood there while she waited for Landry to die, she had no way of knowing. But he was there when she came through the door, and she went into his embrace and put her head on his shoulder without hesitation, as if claiming something that was already hers. As if it was inevitable, as if he had been waiting there only for her to come out, not for the general to go.

She played her music, and she thought, and she slept, and she woke, to drink water and eat some scavenged snacks, sitting there alone, and then turned in her chair to take up her instrument and continue the song.

And finally, she emerged from her room and walked the corridor -- past Daniel's closed door, past Cameron's, to the cabin that Teal'c had claimed, so long ago, and Sam knocked.

When he opened the door, she met his eyes. His gaze was steady and unsurprised, and he stepped aside, out of her way, and let her in.

end


End file.
